"Gabble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... teaches them to know their places; and, "weak masters though they be," without such guidance, yet under his ordering they become powerful, and work together as if endowed with a rational soul and a social purpose; their insane gabble turning to speech, their savage howling to music; ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Clementina, my head aches badly!" said Henrietta. She wished to rid herself of this uncalled-for gabble, in order that she might devote herself to ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... glad to know one person in the country who doesn't gabble his head off. You haven't answered any of my questions, and you've made me feel as if you'd found a dangerous, wild woman that morning. It isn't very flattering, but I ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... pushed his reserve into the breach and when his gabble-gear was again disengaged resumed ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Englishman mad. A Boer farmer, sitting on his stoep, large and strong, but absolutely lethargic, is the very incarnation of the spirit of the veldt. At the same time, when one remembers the clatter and gabble of our civilisation, it is impossible to deny him a certain dignity, though it may be only ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... party in good time; for draggled, drenched, and with clinging garments, they were so slow in getting on, that it was no delusion that the water was higher, and the rocks lower; and even Gertrude had neither breath nor spirits to gabble when that grave anxious face met her, and a strong careful hand lifted and helped, first her, then Lance, up and down every difficulty; and when she perceived how the newcomer avoided point-blank looking at the bare ancles ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that," said he, "I can read and write all I've any need for. But as for you, with all your gabble and talk ... I'm ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... gown flying behind him and rustling against the pew doors, mount the pulpit like a conqueror ascending his triumphal car; then, sinking on the velvet cushion in an attitude of studied grace, remain in silent prostration for a certain time; then mutter over a Collect, and gabble through the Lord's Prayer, rise, draw off one bright lavender glove, to give the congregation the benefit of his sparkling rings, lightly pass his fingers through his well-curled hair, flourish a cambric handkerchief, recite a very short passage, ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... Jane was utterly ignorant what the gabble was about, except that Katharine had been in very odd company, and done very strange things with those boys, and she gave a melancholy little sound in the pause; but Kate, taking breath, ran ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... school, which she abominates. She thinks Turner might approve of Suarez in his black and white stripes, but the Guanaco crater reminds her of Gustave Dore, who always exaggerated his tone values. I learn that sort of gabble by heart. Jennie's a good sort, yet sometimes ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... most outrageous pranks of the alliterative age. It is called, "Green-Room Gossip; or, Gravity Gallinipt; A Gallimaufry got up to guile Gymnastical and Gyneocratic Governments; Gathered and Garnished by Gridiron Gabble, Gent., ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... season began, I ceased fishing and took to the gun, for now three or four kinds of duck made their appearance, and one moonlight night an immense number alighted in the creek just below the hut, and kept up an incessant gabble and ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... discussions, that at the best are very second-rate eloquence, and at the worst are respect destroying, mind destroying gabble, there are various forms of "ethical" teaching, advocated and practised in America and in the elementary schools of this country. For example, a story of an edifying sort is told to the children, and comments are elicited ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... met, Acll naise an bother; One ood'n wait ta hire tha tuther. When thAc war tir'd o' jitch a gabble, Ta bAcl na moor not one war yable, A man, a little zActenfare, Got up hiz verdi ta delcare. Now Soce, zed he, why we be gwAcin Ta meet in Vestry here ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... marches was discovering things. Wonder of wonders, this curious people called "baccy" tabac! "And if yer wants a bit of bread yer awsks for pain, strewth!" He loved to hear the French gabble to him in their excited way; he never thought that reciprocally his talk was just as funny. The French matches earned unprintable names. But on the whole he admired sunny France with its squares of golden corn and vegetables, and when he passed a painted ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... read by the usher; and then everybody went to business:— everybody but Hugh and Holt, who had nothing to do. Class after class came up for repetition; and this repetition seemed to the new boys an accomplishment they should never acquire. They did not think that any practice would enable them to gabble, as everybody seemed able to gabble here. Hugh had witnessed something of it before,—Phil having been wont to run off at home, "Sal, Sol, Ren et Splen," to the end of the passage, for the admiration of his sisters, and so much to little Harry's amusement, that Susan, however ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... said the inventor. "I will not insult you by an unworthy suspicion. The world is full of impertinent people, and we can no more stop their gabble, than that of swallows in the air. This nameless fellow signs himself 'One of Many,' That is probably a lie. But if there were thousands like himself prying into your and my affairs, I should not care. As for motives, none but fools and ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... it got worse and worse. There wan't much comfort at home where the inventor was, so I took to stayin' out nights. Went down to the store and hung around, listenin' to fools' gabble, and wishin' I was dead. And the more I stayed out, the more Bennie D. laughed and sneered and hinted. And then come that ridic'lous business about Sarah Ann Christy. That ended it ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... logical mind there is something very distressing in this social law of gabble. Out of regard for Mrs. A, let us say, I attend some festival she has inaugurated. There I meet for the first time a young person of pleasant exterior, and I am placed in her company to deliver her at a dinner-table, or dance her about, or keep her out of harm's way, in a cosy nook. She has ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... the same. But there was one man more difficult to deceive than the whole town put together. The Chevalier de Valois, who had taken refuge on the Sacred Mount of the upper aristocracy, now passed his life at the d'Esgrignons. He listened to the gossip and the gabble, and he thought day and night upon his vengeance. He meant to strike du ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... see now and then wretched election meetings, as of late in New York, where a worn-out FERNANDO WOOD and others like him gabble as much treason as they dare. It is all played out—Mozart, Tammany, and all the trash. Rummy, frowsy candidates, treating Five-Point graduates, and shoulder-hitting bravos yelling at the polls, are beginning ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that several Acts should be kept by each undergraduate; for, to keep up the number (as it seemed), each student had to gabble through a ridiculous form "Si quaestiones tuae falsae sint, Cadit Quaestio:—sed quaestiones tuae falsae sunt, Ergo valent Consequentia et Argumentum." I have forgotten time and place ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... take part with them in their work. Jefferson had sense enough to decline the invitation; but what gleam of sense, political or other, had the blundering tinkers who gave it? The outcome of their gabble was that mob violence destroyed for Paris in the Bastille what London possesses in the Tower, an 'architectural document' of the highest authenticity and importance. To talk of French feudalism as having been overthrown by ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... the sun was not far from its bourne in the horizon, the air was very cold, the wind was rising, and the waves of the noble Tagus began to be crested with foam. I told the boy that it was scarcely possible for the boat to carry so much sail without upsetting, upon which he laughed, and began to gabble in a most incoherent manner. He had the most harsh and rapid articulation that has ever come under my observation in any human being; it was the scream of the hyena blended with the bark of the terrier, though it was by no means an index of his disposition, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... purging and unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance, while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... much reflection, even in a lad of fourteen, although at that age we are not much inclined to think. But Jack was in bed; his eyes were so swollen with the stings of the bees that he could neither read nor otherwise amuse himself; and he preferred his own thoughts to the gabble of Sarah, who attended him; so Jack thought, and the result of his cogitations we ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... our national legislature everything runs to talk, as lettuces, if the season or the soil be unpropitious, shoot up lankly to seed, instead of forming handsome heads) that Babel was the first Congress, the earliest mill erected for the manufacture of gabble. In these days, what with Town Meetings, School Committees, Boards (lumber) of one kind and another, Congresses, Parliaments, Diets, Indian Councils, Palavers, and the like, there is scarce a village which has not its factories ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... run o'er With slaver of the times of yore![1]— Was it for this that back I went As far as Lateran and Trent, To prove that they who damned us then Ought now in turn be damned again? The silent victim still to sit Of Grattan's fire and Canning's wit, To hear even noisy Mathew gabble on, Nor mention once the Whore of Babylon! Oh! 'tis too much—who now will be The Nightman of No-Popery? What Courtier, Saint or even Bishop Such learned filth will ever fish up? If there among our ranks be one To take my place, 'tis thou, Sir John; Thou who like ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... succeeded the first outbreak, and through Normando's gabble came the judge's voice calling for an interpreter. There was no need for the crier to demand silence; every ear was strained for the ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... characters of the play from a French novel, based on an Italian plot, and wove around the story a lot of glittering talk to please the lords and ladies who listened to the silly gabble of their prototypes. ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... quite right. That's over. Now, then, I'm going to gabble for five minutes gaily. [Settling herself comfortably in an armchair.] What jolly flowers you've got there! What have you been doing with yourself? Amos took me to the Caffe Quadri yesterday to late breakfast, to cheer me up. Oh, I've something to say to you! At the Caffe, ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... surprise, yes—shock, his family. She was Chinese, to them a heathen: they would be unable to comprehend any mitigating dignity of rank. Where they'd actually suffer, he realized, would be in the attitude of Salem, the stupid gabble, the censure and cold ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend sitting by—say a wife—he, or she, too (if that be probable), reading another, without interruption, or oral communication?—can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words?—away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... short pause). Joyce, you really are maddening; you know perfectly well that I have to revise and retype an entire short story which in itself is a nerve-racking job, and all you do is to burble and sing, and gabble. ...
— I'll Leave It To You - A Light Comedy In Three Acts • Noel Coward
... machinery stuck fast at this point, both at home and abroad. In one of his gossipy, confidential letters Fisher Ames remarked that Hammond was a most "petulant, impudent" man, habitually railing against the conduct of our government "with a gabble that his feelings render doubly unintelligible." But Pinckney, our representative in England, was equally undiplomatic. He was "sour and also Gallican"; although calm in manner, "he had prejudices, and unless a man has a mind above them, he can ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... senseless jingle-jangle of verse-jargon as to-night! Strange it is that the so-called 'poetical' trick of confusedly heaping words together regardless of meaning, should so bewilder men and deprive them of all wise and sober judgment! By my faith! ... I would as soon listen to the gabble of geese in a farmyard as to the silly glibness of such inflated twaddle, such mawkish sentiment, such turgid garrulity, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... while Vesuvius was brooding its fiery conspiracy under their feet, bring the scene nearer home to us than the letter of Pliny, and deepen the tragedy by their trifling contrast, like the grave-diggers' unseemly gabble in Hamlet. Perhaps our judgment of history is made sounder, and our view of it more lifelike, when we are so constantly reminded how the little things of life assert their place alongside the great ones, and how healthy the ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Kings are expected, like the old Gabble Monarchs, to hold "Darbar" (i.e., give public audience) at least twice a day, morning and evening. Neglect of this practice caused the ruin of the Caliphate and of the Persian and Moghul Empires: the great lords were left ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... would go bodily into half a quarter of it—would be swallowed up like a mouthful, and never seen again! Castle Warlock was twice as old—that was something! but why had not Lady Joan told him hundreds of stories about Cairncarque, instead of letting him gabble on about their little place? But she could not love her castle as he did his, for she had no such father in it! That must be what made the difference! That was why she did not care to talk about it! Was he actually going to see her again? and would she be to him ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... speaking slightly through his nose, 'of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce! Am I to rush out into the street, collar the first man of a wealthy appearance that I meet, shake him, and say, "Go to law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I'll be the death of you"? Yet that would ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... word, but she knew not what to say. Life at Bloomington supplied no parallel to the rapidity of existence in New York that evening. She was aware of statements being made in language which rang familiarly in her ears, but they had no more coherence in her clogged understanding than the gabble of dementia. ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... much of the habit of a useful employment of their minds, to sink, in their ordinary daily occupations, into that wretched inanity we were representing; or to consume the free intervals of time in the listlessness, or worthless gabble, or vain sports, of which their neighbors furnished plenty ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... Indiana and Ohio, was one of the most romantic episodes of the war. But it ended in his defeat and capture. While his gallant troopers rode to their destruction, the men who loved to swear by Arcturus and to gabble about the Pleiades showed the fiber to be expected of such people, and ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... Ferd," said the Cap'n, eagerly, forgetting for the moment the presence of Constable Nute, "those wimmen might gabble a little at you and make threats and things like that—but—but—there isn't anything they can do, you understand!" He winked at Mr. Parrott. "You know what ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... noticed the king didn't get mellow enough to forget to remember to not deny about hiding the money-bag again. That made me feel easy and satisfied. Of course when they got to snoring we had a long gabble, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of these circular baskets, filled with tiny dough-balls. Makers of rice-wine, said Heywood; as he strode along explaining, he threw off his surly fit. The brilliant sunlight, the breeze stirring toward them from a background of drooping bamboos, the gabble of coolies, the faint aroma of the fermenting no-me cakes, began, after all, to give a truant ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... is this wretched delusion. The chattering of monkeys or parrots is more acceptable than to mock God with a solemn sound upon a thoughtless tongue. Jews gabble Hebrew, and Papists Latin, and, alas! others who NEVER prayed, have been from childhood in the habit of repeating or reading a form of words, called, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... one who wishes to retain a shred of respect for his own species. If you listen long, and then fix your mind so that you can pick out the exact significance of what you have heard, you become confounded. Take the scraps of "bar" gabble. "So I says, 'Lay me fours.' And he winks and says, 'I'll give you seven to two, if you like.' Well, you know, the horse won, and I stood him a bottle out of the three pound ten, so I wasn't much in." "'What!' says I; 'step outside along o' me, and bring your pal with ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... these days will sometimes condescend to bestow on a country miss, when there is no prettier or more fashionable woman present. The manner indeed was different, for the etiquette of those times did not permit Sir Piercie Shafton to pick his teeth, or to yawn, or to gabble like the beggar whose tongue (as he says) was cut out by the Turks, or to affect deafness or blindness, or any other infirmity of the organs. But though the embroidery of his conversation was different, the groundwork was the same, and the high-flown and ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... could brand her with disgrace. Never did there exist a human being, that needed, with less fear, expose all their actions, and call upon the universe to judge them. An event of the most deplorable sort, has awfully imposed silence upon the gabble ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... feast—he would but close the door and draw the blinds, that God's eye may not look upon the iniquity, nor his finger trace upon the frescoed walls the fateful Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin! Save thy breath, good doctor, to cool thy dainty broth; for, mad with pride, thy master hears nor heeds the gabble of the goose beneath his walls, nor the watchdog's warning. Gnaw thy bone in peace, for the people, schooled to patience and amused with panaceas, will scarce resent the trampling of one more parvenu upon ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... trail-strain and the depressing atmosphere of the Watts ranch, it seemed to Patty she must shriek aloud if the woman persisted in her ceaseless gabble. ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... is volatile in its adorations, and to-morrow will be petting a bronzed soldier, or a black African, or a prince, or a spiritualist: ideas cannot take root in its ever-shifting soil. It is besides addicted in self-defence to gabble exclusively of the affairs of its rapidly revolving world, as children on a whirligoround bestow their attention on the wooden horse or cradle ahead of them, to escape from giddiness and preserve a notion of identity. The professor ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... concluded that the old battle between rich and poor was a folly. The obscure hamlets of New England, which have within thirty years become beautiful towns, with lyceums, libraries, and schools, are the most striking examples on earth of the arrant folly of this gabble of 'capital as opposed to labor.' In the South, however, the old theory is held as firmly as in the days when John Randolph prophesied Northern insurrections of starving factory-slaves against manufacturing lords, and—as President ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... more such stories as these are ript up; that would burthen the strongest memory to bear them: and so much the more, because it is impossible to distinguish one from the t'other, when the men and the women that gabble so one among another. And oft-times they spin such course threads of bawdery in their talk, that are enough to spoil a whole web of linnen. And who can tell but that their tattling would last a whole night, for there's hardly one of them who hath not at the least a hundred in their Budgets; ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... strange fellows from Northern Russia. They had everything to sell, bright beads and looking-glasses and little lacquered trays, coloured boxes, red and green and yellow, lace and silk and cloths of every colour, purple and crimson and gold. From all these men there rose a deafening gabble. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... 'em gabble like a pack of old women," laughed Jack, as the friendly argument about the ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... consecutive good lines." He would only admit two good verses in Gray's exquisite "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," where it would take a very acid critic to find two bad ones. "Tristram Shandy" would not live. "Hamlet" was gabble. Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" was poor stuff, and he never wrote anything good except "A Tale of a Tub." Voltaire was illiterate. Rousseau was a scoundrel. Deists, like Hume, Priestley, or Gibbon, could not be ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to the heart by this cold and grinning kindness as much as by the harshness of Keller or the coarse German banter of Nucingen. The familiarity of the man, and his grotesque gabble excited by champagne, seemed to tarnish the soul of the honest bourgeois as though he came from a house of financial ill-fame. He went down the stairway and found himself in the streets without knowing where he was going. As he walked along ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... reach." It is not what foolish sound is shaped by a deal of stinking breath and blown adown the wind to be forgotten like the bray of an asthmatic burro, to perish like the snows of yesteryear, that should be our concern—not what the idle gabble of Mrs. Grundy proclaims us, but what we actually are. Public opinion is an ever-shifting rainbow. The "heretics" of one age are the saints of the next: the "cranks" of our own time may be the philosophers of the ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... gabble, Murray!" suddenly cried Alan Hawke, dropping a double barrier of the newest Times, as he prepared to leave the clubroom in disgust. "Hugh Johnstone was only called down to Calcutta on some important financial business some days ago, and ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... case, for he was like the rest of the tribe, always ready to fight with words, not acts; but in the midst of his gabble Joan interrupted with the ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... shrill ringing of a bell, the sound of feet and the gabble of a phonographic message. The man in yellow appeared. "Yes?" ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... hearth and home, To scour the stairs and search the bin for flour, To bear the burden of maternity? Is this the wife they wove who framed our law And pillared a bright land on smiling homes? Down all the stretch of street to the last house There is no shape more angular than hers, More tongued with gabble of her neighbours' deeds, More filled with nerve-ache and rheumatic twinge, More fraught with ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... air for a quarter of an hour's spell and made their announcement, and then the copper helmets were clapped into place again, and once more like a pair of uncouth sea monsters they slowly and clumsily faded away into the depths. A gabble of excited Italian kept pace to the turning of the air-pumps, and of that language Kettle knew barely a score of words. Practically these people might have weaved any kind of plot noisily and under his very nose without his being any the wiser, and this possibility ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... done well to ship him to America. At the opera, with Lord Ossory and Mr. Fitzpatrick, I talked through the round of the boxes, from Lady Pembroke's on the right to Lady Hervey's on the left, where Dolly's illness and Lady Harrington's snuffing gabble were the topics rather than Giardini's fiddling. Mr. Storer took me to Foote's dressing-room at the Haymarket, where we found the Duke of Cumberland lounging. I was presented, and thought his Royal Highness ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the services. Ralph in no way cared for this excessive devotion, and he proposed to take her for a walk in the afternoon, but she preferred to accompany Mrs. Ede to church. It loosened the tension of her thoughts to raise her voice in the hymns, and the old woman's gabble was pleasant to listen to on their way home—a sort of meaningless murmur in her ears while she was thinking of Dick, whom she might meet on the doorstep. It was, however, his portmanteau that they caught sight of in the passage ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... manners, nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and I'll tear you limb from limb! I've put enough of other people's private lives on the screen! My own stays off! I'm not going to have even a phoney screen-show built around Babs and me for people to gabble about!" ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... remember with a strange feeling that there are people who, of their free choice, spend day and night in cities, who throng to the gabble of drawing-rooms, make festival in public eating- houses, sweat in the glare of the theatre. They call it life; they call it enjoyment. Why, so it is, for them; they are so made. The folly is mine, to wonder that they ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... yawp! Under the moon and sun. It's aye the rabble, And I to gabble, And hey! for the tale that ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... tried to cheer him up with the prospect of a second Waterloo, the Waterloo that all the war-correspondents said was coming off next week, he refused to listen to what he called our putrid gabble. There wouldn't be any Waterloo next week or the week after, he said. "There won't be any Waterloo for another ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... the word, that machine just bounded. Who else in this republic has any reason to jump at the name of a newly-arrived Englishman like Falconroy except the man who's shot him? Isn't that better evidence than a lot of gabble from witnesses—if the evidence of a ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... prose. Suckling and Davenant and their fellows not only used the utmost license of redundant syllables at the end of the line, but hustled and slurred the syllables in the middle till the line was a mere gabble, and interspersed broken lines so plentifully that it became impossible even for the most attentive ear to follow the metre. A brief description of a Puritan waiting-woman may be taken as an illustration from Jasper Mayne's comedy of The City Match (1639). As a sample of blank verse it is ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... she had worked much at schools, and was really an able and spirited teacher, liking the occupation; and laying hold of the first book in her way, she requested Conrade to read. He obeyed, but in such a detestable gabble that she looked up appealingly to Fanny, who suggested, "My dear, you can read better than that." He read four lines, not badly, but then broke off, "Mamma, are not we to have ponies? Coombe heard of a pony this morning; it is to be seen at the 'Jolly Mariner,' ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... effort for me to answer him; I felt as if I wanted only to be let alone, and I realised, without being able to control it, that my voice was very irritable as I said briefly, "One has got to be silent when you begin to gabble." ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... ain't how many tongues you got, 'Les' shoes would talk an' wagons, too; An' all de bells would gabble a lot, An' tattle an' brag de long day th'ough; But it's gyardin' yo' tongue f'om talk dat's wrong, An' passin' a helpful word along, An' maybe singin' a hopeful song— Dat's de way ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... not so cold As the bright smile he sees me win, Nor the host's oldest wine so old As our poor gabble, sour and thin. ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... Musgrave. And so I prophesy that he will not marry Clarice Pendomer, because he is inevitably tired of her by this. He will marry money, just as all the Musgraves do. Moreover, I prophesy that we will gabble about this mess until we find a newer target for our stone throwing, and be just as friendly with the participants to their faces as we ever were. So don't let me hear any idiotic talk about whether or no I am going ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... great rain-drops that fell from his broad-brimmed hat added to the forlornness of his condition. The ducks by the roadside ran to their ponds quacking as he approached; and even the geese seemed to pity his condition, for they awoke to gabble him out a salutation, and having shook their feathers, they would sail in the same direction, so long as there was water, and then take leave of him with a loud gabbling. But this homage brought him no consolation: indeed, the bleak earth seemed sending a deeper chill to his heart; and the brown ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... me, and to relieve him, who all of them spoke to me in no other language but Latin. As to the rest of his family, it was an inviolable rule, that neither himself nor my mother, man nor maid, should speak any thing in my company, but such Latin words as every one had learned only to gabble with me. It is not to be imagined how great an advantage this proved to the whole family: my father and my mother by this means learned Latin enough to understand it perfectly well, and to speak it to such a degree ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... he, "I have given you a hard task. We can all gabble the Lord's Prayer, but how few have ever prayed it! But at least try, my poor soul, and I will set you an example. I will pray for my brother Robinson and my brother Hawes, and I shall pray for them all the more warmly that at present one is a blaspheming thief ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... He opened and shut his mouth like a fish. Then suddenly he began to gabble, he poured out thanks and assurances and deprecations in a stammering torrent. His gratitude overwhelmed Joanna, disgusted her. She lost her feeling of warmth and compassion—after all, what should she pity ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... of this world differ in pathos and pitch as the stars differ, one from another, in glory. There is a style for every taste, a melody for every ear. The gabble of geese is music to the goose; the hoot of the hoot-owl is lovlier to his mate than the nightingale's lay; the concert of Signor "Tomasso Cataleny" and Mademoiselle "Pussy" awakeneth the growling old bachelor from his dreams, ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... of the most extraordinary nature. For one who is always preaching of Truth of Beauty, the dulness of his moral sense is perfectly ludicrous. He cannot see that the hero into whose mouth he places his favourite metaphysical gabble—his dissertations about the stars, the passions, the Greek plays, and what not—his eternal whine about what he calls the good and the beautiful—is a fellow as mean and paltry as can be well imagined; a ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... dressed sturdy little boy with a sullen face is Louis. Pierre tries to make conversation in our own language to entertain us. "Are you to Australie going?" he asks. We tell him we are going first to Egypt. "Monter au chameau!" he cries excitedly, going off into a gabble of French and beseeching us to take him with us as "boy." We tell him that he is too small and that it costs much money. "Have you money—English?" he asks. He is very much interested when we show him half a crown and explain that it is equal to three francs of his ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... instead of brown, and he wore a red carnation in his button-hole. Maria inhaled the clovy fragrance of it. At the next station more passengers got into the train, and Wollaston seized upon that excuse to ask to share Maria's seat. They talked incessantly—an utterly foolish gabble like that of young birds. An old gentleman across the aisle cast an impatient glance at them from time to time. Finally he arose stiffly and went into the smoker. Their youth and braggadocio of innocence and ignorance, and the remembrance ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... you, I will do so with pleasure if you think it necessary, but I dread, on your account as well as my own, the newspaper talk and gabble that will follow. It might embarrass you with others. With the modern facility of dictating you can converse with me without restraint, and all letters passing between us can be returned to the writer. In conclusion permit me to say, and perhaps I am justified ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... not found my article on the dolmens. But I have my manuscript (entire) of my trip in Brittany among my "unpublished works." We shall have to gabble when you are ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... only when all retire for the night. No privacy, no isolation is allowed. If you take a book and begin to read in a remote corner of a parlor or piazza, some idle matron or idiotic girl will tranquilly invade your poor little bit of privacy and gabble of her affairs and the day's gossip. There is no escape unless you mount to your ten-by-twelve cell and sit (like the Premiers of England when they visit Balmoral) on the bed, to do your writing, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... to the top with clean and comfortable children's clothing. We came presently to where the boys were reciting their catechism. An ecclesiastic was hearing them;—they seemed ready enough with their answers, but were allowed to gabble off the holy words in a manner almost unintelligible, and quite indecorous. They were bright, healthy-looking little fellows, ranging apparently from eight to twelve in age. They had good play-ground set off for them, and shady galleries to walk up ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Warra Swamp at noon, and camped for dinner in a shady "bangalow" grove, so as not to disturb the ducks, whose delightful gabble and piping was plainly audible. We grilled our birds, and made our tea. Whilst we were having a smoke, a truly magnificent white-headed fish eagle lit on the top of a dead tree, three hundred yards away—a splendid shot for a rifle. It remained for some ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... not, maybe not. Niver did want to get back when he was away. But, say, Marjie Star-face, Fort Wallace away out on the Plains ain't Rockport; and rich men's homes and all that gabble they was desecratin' the Sabbath with at supper last night—" O'mie broke off and took the girl's trembling hand in his. "Oh! I can look after that rascal's good name, but I don't dare to fix things up for you two, no matter what I know." ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... their mother occupying the other, and Totty throned between them. There was a little desultory talk and seeking of places, and then the four elder children, standing round the table, read a chapter, verse for verse. Then followed the recitation of the catechism in that queer, mechanical gabble that Bessie recollected so well. "If you stop to think you are sure to break down," was still the warning. After that Jack said the collect and epistle for the day, and Willie and Tom said the gospel, and the lesser ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... see you." Ann came suddenly down to earth, and tried to focus her attention on. Miss Caroline's hospitable gabble. "Such a lot of people here this afternoon, too.... I'm so pleased. And a beautiful day, isn't it? Even Mr. Coventry has been tempted out of his shell. He'll be quite a social acquisition to the neighbourhood soon, at ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... what he was saying so well that he did not need even to think about it, for his eyes wandered over his folded hands as though in methodical search for somebody. They reached Form I, and Robert, who saw them coming, broke instinctively into a panic-stricken gabble. Of all the poems which Christine had read aloud to him, Casablanca was the only one he could remember, and he had got as far as "whence all but he had fled" before he saw that it was of no good. The subterfuge had been recognized. The clergyman ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... guinea-fowl when a hawk's in air! I must have snoozed; yet, I caught the gabble. There'll be A clatter all day now, with two women's tongues, Clack-clack against each other, in the house— Two pendulums in one clock. Lucky I'm deaf. But, I remember. Give me back the bairn. Nay: this is not the wench. I want Jim's bride— The mother of his daughter. Judith, lass, ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... be so amply stored as to continue brilliant through decades of much speaking, and the sparkle of Mrs. Orr's conversation was gradually shrouded in the weariness of what a blunt neighbor termed her "inveterate gabble." As it must be, this woman of exceptional opportunities early lost true sensitiveness, and, both as guest and hostess, ignored the offense of inconsiderate and self- seeking interruptions. She broke into the speech of others with crude abandon. The itch to lead ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... you keep 'em, pay their keep, But gabble's the short cut to ruin; It's gratis, (gals half-price,) but cheap At no rate, ef it henders doin'; Ther' 's nothin' wuss, 'less 't is to set A martyr-prem'um upon jawrin': Teapots git dangerous, ef you shet Their lids down on 'em ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... him, of course, they would use a different scrambler circuit than the one which was plugged into his own unit, but he would be able to hear the gabble of voices, even if he couldn't ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... and the neighbor women, who as usual were gathered in her house, were loud in their exclamations of pleasure and wonder at seeing him safe home again from "the blowing up of the mine," but he gruffly bade them "be quiet, and not be making all that gabble about ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... Critique des Arts with a pretty compliment to Alice's executive energy, and added 'that it was one of the rare soirees of the season.' He must have been drunk when he wrote it. I played badly—I never can play when they gabble. It was as garrulous as a fish market in front. Enfin! It was over and we telegraphed his reverence the result; from a money standpoint it was ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... the dignitaries thereof. They go about setting men by the ears, bringing down to the minds of the commoner sort high matters that are not meet for such to handle, and inciting them to chatter and gabble over holy things in unseemly wise. Whereso they preach, 'tis said, the very women will leave their distaffs, and begin to talk of sacred matter—most unbecoming and scandalous it is! I avise you, my son, to have none ado with such, ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... this gabble of 'sects and schisms,' this disputation which makes a simple mind take refuge in the epigram attributed to Swift on Handel and Bononcini,[234] criticism and popular intelligence have been unanimous upon two points, first, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... had been to Rome; but imagination simply, refused to picture Mrs. Nevill Tyson in Rome. Her presence in the Eternal City seemed something less than her footprint in its dust or her shadow on its walls. Nothing is more irritating than to have your dream of a place destroyed by the light-hearted gabble of some idiot who has seen it; but Mrs. Nevill Tyson spared your dreams. The most delicate ideal would have been undisturbed by the soft sweep of her generalities, or the graceful flight of her fancy from the ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... faces, and beautiful eyes, stop in their spinning, holding the distaff suspended, while they examine us at leisure. At our left, as we turn from the church and its sunny piazza, where old women sit and gabble, down the ravine, is a snug village under the mountain by the shore, with a great square medieval tower. On the right, upon rocky points, are remains of round towers, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... here in large numbers from other countries, chiefly from France; and in London abound in Leicester-square, and are constantly to be met with under the Quadrant in Regent-street, where they grin, gabble, chatter, and sometimes dance, to the no small ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... sent for him. Some kind of a gabble-fest on the star-star level, I gather. Otherwise we're almost ready to blast. And we know what kind of cargo ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... and given Sardanapalus an additional epaulette. Why, had a string of wild-geese at the time been warping their way on the wind, they would merely have shot the wedge firmer and sharper into the air, and answered the earth-born shout with an air-born gabble—clangour to clangour. Where were Mr Atherstone's powers of ratiocination, and all his acoustics? Two shouts slew an eagle. What became of all the other denizens of air—especially crows, ravens, and vultures, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... phrases, run into each other without so much as a comma or a full stop (since I have had to punctuate my translation, at least partially, to make it intelligible); the excited, unconsecutive, unceasing, discursive, reiterating gabble of hysteria, eager, vague, impotent, thoughts suddenly vanishing and as suddenly coming to a dead stop; everything rattled off as if between two sobs or two convulsions. Did Alfieri enjoy receiving letters such as these? Doubtless: they were echoes of his own ravings; fuel ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... But she met with no solitary villager; and she strayed onward, almost unwittingly in the direction of the cemetery. In passing by the church, she pushed open one of the heavy, swinging doors, and cast a glance around; there was no one in sight, but the gabble of boys' voices in some vestry close by reached her ear, and a laugh rang after it, which echoed noisily in the quiet aisles. The high altar was lit up by a light from a side-window and her eye was arrested by it. Still, whether she ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... perfection in practice. It seems a very safe and reasonable contrivance for occupying the attention of the country, and is certainly a better way of settling questions than by push of pike. Yet, if one should ask it why it should not rather be called government by gabble, it would have to fumble in its pocket a good while before it found the change for a convincing reply. As matters stand, too, it is beginning to be doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit at Westminster and Washington or in the editors' rooms of the leading journals, so thoroughly is everything ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... ... gabble-gabble!' My window glimpses larch and heather. I hardly hear the tuneful babble, Not knowing nor much caring whether The text is praise or exhortation, Prayer or ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... a sufficient answer to the feudal gabble of a man, who is every day lessening that splendour of character which once illuminated the kingdom, then dazzled, and afterwards inflamed it; and for whom it will be happy if the nation shall, at last, dismiss ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... upon her nest. She had to hatch her ducklings, but she was almost tired out before the little ones came; and she seldom had visitors. The other ducks liked better to swim about in the canals than to run up to sit under a burdock and gabble with her. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... pulled Cleena's apron from her waist and piled them in that. She sat on, silently regarding him. For a few minutes she honestly believed that he was a genuine specimen of the "little people" who were said to make green Erin their favorite home. But when he began to gabble in a hoarse, excited tone of how he had long been expecting this "find"; how he had watched his opportunity when all the household should be absent that he might disobey and use the explosive that would lessen his labor so greatly, she came back ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... still awake, Pleasing most when most I speak; The delight of old and young, Though I speak without a tongue. Nought but one thing can confound me, Many voices joining round me; Then I fret, and rave, and gabble, Like the labourers of Babel. Now I am a dog, or cow, I can bark, or I can low; I can bleat, or I can sing, Like the warblers of the spring. Let the lovesick bard complain, And I mourn the cruel pain; Let the happy swain rejoice, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... to do the work that Mr. Speaker does— With nobody to help him except the trembling Sergeant, While still begin and never end the shout and scream and buzz? Oh, never any where, save in desert groves Brazilian, Was ever heard such endless and aimless gabble yet. For there the tribes of monkeys to the number of a million, Screech and chatter without ceasing, from the sunrise to the set. Rap! rap! rap! To quell the rising clamor; Order! order! order! Hammer! ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... poultry, it being one of the few privileges of the poor blacks to raise as many as they can, their abundance is literally a nuisance—ducks, fowls, pigeons, turkeys (the two latter species, by the bye, are exclusively the master's property), cluck, scream, gabble, gobble, crow, cackle, fight, fly, and flutter in all directions, and to their immense concourse, and the perfect freedom with which they intrude themselves even into the piazza of the house, the pantry, ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... here alludes to an odd fancy or trick of his own;—whenever he was at a loss for something to say, he used always to gabble over "1 2 ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... for solitude! SOLITUDE!" he repeated, with a laugh. "Why, I hold daily conversations with any blessed thing in this house, from the veranda to the chimney-stack, with any stick of furniture, from the footstool to the towel-horse. I get more out of it than the gabble at the Club. You look surprised. Listen! I took this thing up in my leisure hours in the Department. I had read much about the conversation of animals. I argued that if animals conversed, why shouldn't inanimate things communicate with each ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... persons go to the theatres; the playbills, however, are not seductive. If you go in, you will find the house nearly empty; the actors gabble their parts with as little action as possible. You see they are bored, and they bore us. Sometimes when some actor, naturally comic, says or does something funny, the audience laughs, and then suddenly leaves off ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... favourites, and satirized their enemies, among which last the very worst, in their opinions, were their parents, guardians, and masters. "The character of Dick," said Hodgkinson more than once to this writer, "is not overcharged." Our youngsters were quite pat at stage gabble, and ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... a gander and his flock of geese that stood round him; shook their wings and set up their goose-gabble. It was day then, although there was still a star in the sky. He threw furze-roots where there was a glow, and made a fire blaze up again. Then the dogs of the town came down to look at him, and then ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... thou art pledging the book I shall have time to finish davening." He hitched up his Talith and commenced to gabble off, "Happy are they who dwell in Thy house; ever shall they praise Thee, Selah," and was already saying, "And a Redeemer shall come unto Zion," by the time Esther rushed out through the door with the pledge. It was a gaudily ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... them two fellers so as to gabble about 'em when their backs is turned," said John Milton gloomily to himself, with a dismal premonition of the prolonged tea-table gossip he would be ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... skirted the great tributary marshes, alive with water-fowl of every description, whose gabble and flapping wings could be heard at a long distance. He camped in the vast hardwood forests that covered the western point of the peninsula that extends west from Lake Ontario to the river connecting Lake Huron with Lake Erie. He shot big bustards and wild turkeys ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... Rabble may appear inspir'd, By Coxcombs envy'd, and by Fools admir'd. I pity Madmen who attempt to fly, And raise their Airy Babel to the Sky. Who, arm'd with Gabble, to create a Name, Design a Beauty, and a Monster frame, Not so the Seat of Phoebus role, which lay In Ruins buried, and a long Decay. To Britany the Temple was convey'd, By Natures utmost force, and more than Human Aid. Built from the Basis by a noble Few, The stately Fabrick ...
— Discourse on Criticism and of Poetry (1707) - From Poems On Several Occasions (1707) • Samuel Cobb
... bein' found dead in 'is bed with 'is 'ands a-clutchin' a pack o' cards. An' the ace o' spades—that's death—was turned uppermost. So they goes chatterin' an' chitterin' as 'ow the old chap 'ad been playin' cards wi' the devil, an' got a bad end. But Miss Tranter, she don't listen to maids' gabble,—she's doin' well, devil or no devil—an' if any one was to talk to 'er 'bout ghosteses an' sich-like, she'd wallop 'em out of 'er bar with a broom! Ay, that she would! She's a powerful strong woman Miss Tranter, an' many's the larker what's felt 'er 'and on 'is collar a-chuckin' ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... anonymously in the Fortnightly Review[31] in the winter of 1893-4, and of which he told me he was the writer, he had given a character sketch of what he called 'The Rhetoricians.' Their performances since the Union were summarised in the phrase 'a century of unremitting gabble,' and he regarded it as a sad commentary on Irish life that such brilliant talents so largely ran to waste ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... acquainted with its contents. But the commissioner (worthy man) spends his days in doing little else; and when we bear in mind the parallel case of the irreverent curate, we need not be surprised that he took the passage tempo prestissimo, in one roulade of gabble—that I, with the trained attention of an educated man, could gather but a fraction of its import—and the sailors nothing. No profanity in giving orders, no sheath-knives, Midway Island and any ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the next she slackened the strings and let it back upon her neck, in a passion at it for making her too hot. Her talk was a wild, somewhat weird, farrago of utterly meaningless balderdash, mere inarticulate gabble, snatches of old Jacobite ballads and exaggerated phrases from the drama, to which she suited equally exaggerated action. She "babbled of green fields" and Highland glens; she prophesied "the drawing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his established custom, Herr Carovius failed to show the slightest interest in her gabble; at least he made no concessions to her. Nor did he fuss and fume; he gazed into space, and seemed to be thinking about many serious things all at the same time. His silence made Philippina raging mad. She jumped up and left without saying good-bye ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning,[387-96] but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes With words that made them known. But thy vile race, Though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou Deservedly confined into this rock, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of the Fair but footmarks and oyster-shells. Running away was her pet principle; the only system, she maintained, by which you can live long and easily and lose nothing. If you run away when you see danger, you can come back when all is safe. Run quickly, return slowly, hold your head high, and gabble as loud as you can, and you'll preserve the respect of the Goose Green to a peaceful old age. Why should you struggle and get hurt, if you can lower your head and swerve, and not lose a feather?! Why in the world should any one spoil the pleasure of life, or risk ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... intense in colour and in sentiment. A light white frost was melting, in the first rays of the sun, to a silver dew, that twinkled on grass and bush and twig. Now and then a beech leaf, prematurely gold, came spinning down in the still air; from high places of heaven a tiny gabble of music, cold, and shrill, and sweet, told of the songs of the larks at those heavenly gates within which Larry's and Christian's spirits ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... course it was. I'd no business to gabble, and just because you and your new job, Mag, came to my mind at that minute, there I went ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... the two hemispheres of the Christian world; by whose gyronomonic circumbilvaginations, as by two celivagous filopendulums, all the autonomatic metagrobolism of the Romish Church, when tottering and emblustricated with the gibble-gabble gibberish of this odious error and heresy, is homocentrically poised. But what harm, in the devil's name, have these poor devils the Capuchins and Minims done unto him? Are not these beggarly devils sufficiently wretched already? Who can imagine that these poor snakes, the very extracts ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... came but rarely, lest the gossips in the neighborhood should take it upon themselves to gabble. Once in about ten days he made his appearance in the evening and installed himself in a corner in the back shop with his pipe. He rarely spoke but laughed ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... the boy thought he was too good to sit and listen to such gabble. "Now listen to me, you crows!" said he. "I think you ought to be ashamed of yourselves to talk about all your wickedness. I have lived amongst wild geese for three weeks, and of them I have never heard or seen anything but good. You must have a bad chief, since he permits you to rob and murder ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... not understand French. He sat in the crowded court room, very weary and bored, listening to the unceasing, explosive French that now one official and now another uttered. It was just so much gabble to Ah Cho, and he marvelled at the stupidity of the Frenchmen who took so long to find out the murderer of Chung Ga, and who did not find him at all. The five hundred coolies on the plantation knew that Ah San had done the ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... holy, and I won't be called holy. I want deeds, not words. If you love me you'll learn your lessons properly the night before, not just gabble them over ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... and the Californians, but one other class seemed to be moving with any deliberation. These were men seen generally alone, or at most in pairs. They were quiet, waxy pale, dressed always neatly in soft black hat, white shirt, long black coat, and varnished boots. In the face of a general gabble they seemed to remain indifferently silent, self-contained and aloof. To occasional salutations they responded briefly ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... in," a shrill voice cried, making itself heard over the gabble of fifty others. "My Jenny ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... there is some matter which must be read to a sick person, do it slowly. People often think that the way to get it over with least fatigue to him is to get it over in least time. They gabble; they plunge and gallop through the reading. There never was a greater mistake. Houdin, the conjuror, says that the way to make a story seem short is to tell it slowly. So it is with reading to the sick. I have often ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... croakers who were getting into their trowsers would reply with—"Oh, stop your gabble, will you? don't be in such a hurry, now. You feel sweet, don't you?" with other exclamations, some of which were ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... ocean, and visited every principal seaport, and yet knew nothing of any of them. It is a sad fault with us all, and especially with women—we don't think enough. The mass of young women trifle a great portion of their life away on the smallest imaginable things. They chatter like birds and gabble like geese, without the trouble of thinking. The things they see and hear every day awaken no consecutive thought. The stars shine above them, and they call them pretty things, but never ask the astronomic story of their magnificence. The world beats its ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver |
